THE SECRET LIVES OF CITIZENS: Pursuing the Promise of American Life.

• Author: Noah, Timothy
• Position: Review

THE SECRET LIVES OF CITIZENS: Pursuing the Promise of American Life by Thomas Geoghegan Pantheon, $25

THOMAS GEOGHEGAN HAS written a book urging the rehabilitation of the civic idea in America that isn't the slightest bit boring, or pious, or given to bland generalization. That Geoghegan has achieved this won't surprise readers of his previous book, Which Side Are You On?, about his experiences as a labor lawyer during a decade (the 1980s) when the labor movement was all but extinguished. Like Which Side Are You On?, The Secret Lives of Citizens is a book that delivers its political and economic arguments with lyricism and a certain amount of humorous whining. If the monologist Spalding Gray were a Washington policy wonk, this is what he would sound like.

Readers are liable to take initial offense at the casual way Geoghegan drifts from discussing his dating life to discussing wage inequality, or low-income housing policy, or Chicago's inner-city tuberculosis epidemic. As The Secret Lives of Citizens progresses, however, one becomes increasingly aware that Geoghegan's life as a self-absorbed, trattoria-hopping baby boomer is entwined with his life as a political activist committed to improving the lives of the poor and lower middle class. Geoghegan may sound like a narcissist, but he is sincerely angry about his country's weak commitment to social justice, and deadly serious about finding a way to revive the spirit of the Progressive movement and the New Deal. (His book's subtitle is an allusion to The Promise of American Life, a famous Progressive tract written by New Republic founder Herbert Croly.) As a labor lawyer in Chicago, Geoghegan spends his days actually putting his ideals into practice--a point about which he simply refuses to be self-righteous. For Geoghegan, social justice is as much a personal quality-of-life issue as finding a good latte.

For the most part, The Secret Lives of Citizens is a series of anecdotes and pithy observations about what Geoghegan has observed in his lifelong quest to be a responsible citizen. But the book does follow a loose autobiographical structure, moving from Geoghegan's time as a young staff writer at The New Republic and then an aide in Jimmy Carter's Energy department, to his decision to move to Chicago and practice labor law, to his volunteer work for Mayor Harold Washington (whose death, Geoghegan argues, ended a glorious renaissance of the civic idea in Chicago), to his ruminations about...